Well known for her work in Mississipi, Fannie Lou Hamer was a voting rights activist, a leader in the Civil Rights movement and philanthropist.
USA TODAY

Fannie Lou Hamer speaks to Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party sympathizers outside the Capitol in Washington, Sept. 17, 1965, after the House of Representatives rejected a challenge to the 1964 election of five Mississippi representatives. Hamer and two other black women were seated on the floor of the House while the challenge was considered. The challengers claimed blacks were excluded from the election process in Mississippi.(Photo: AP)

WASHINGTON — Vanessa Garrison will lace up her orange Nikes on Friday and join dozens of others in Ruleville, Miss., in the 1.5-mile walk from City Hall to the gravesite of civil rights legend and voting rights pioneer Fannie Lou Hamer.

From rural Ruleville to the U.S. Capitol, community groups, lawmakers and hundreds of black women across the country this week are celebrating the work of Hamer, whose 100th birthday would have been Friday. Hamer's declaration, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired," remains a mantra of the civil rights movement.

Garrison, who traveled from Washington, D.C., and others making the GirlTrek walk in Ruleville wanted to pay homage to Hamer in her hometown.

“It was important for us in terms of honoring her that we come the community to show our respects to her, to walk the hallowed ground that she walked on and to tell her story from this place so that it’s not lost,’’ said Garrison, a co-founder along with Morgan Dixon of GirlTrek, a health movement to inspire black women and girls.

In Shreveport, La., the Kingstowne Family Life Center is hosting a GirlTrek walk Saturday. In San Diego, Project New Village will host an evening gala Friday.

And in Washington, D.C., the March on Washington Film Festival will showcase a mini-documentary on her life Oct. 11.

Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Democrat who represents the Mississippi Delta, led a 30-minute salute to Hamer on the House floor Tuesday night.

“For a lot of us, it was her spirit and her energy that has served as a beacon," Thompson, who worked with Hamer in the Delta, said in an interview with USA TODAY. “She encouraged engagement. She encouraged confrontation, if need be. And she encouraged speaking truth to power. It was that general spirit that made her an icon, not just among women and not just among black people, but a lot of people in this country.”

Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, returned from a trip last Saturday to Puerto Rico to assess the damage there caused by Hurricane Maria.(Photo: Deborah Barfield Berry, USA TODAY)

She joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) when she was 37 years old helping register blacks to vote in Mississippi.

She also played a key role in organizing “Freedom Summer,” during which volunteers from across the country, mostly college students, came to Mississippi in 1964 to register blacks to vote.

But Hamer garnered national attention after she helped form the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged the state’s all-white party establishment, and when she took the stage at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City.

Her efforts led to Democrats later requiring convention delegations to include more blacks and women.

“She dared to step up and start speaking out against injustices,’’ recalled Dorie Ladner, 75, a native of Hattiesburg, Miss.

Ladner, then a field secretary for SNCC, worked with Hamer in the 1960s to register blacks to vote. She said Hamer, a sharecropper, risked her life to challenge segregation in the turbulent South.

Ladner will join a panel discussion about Hamer as part of the film screeing in Washington. ’

“To be able to lift her image up, to see that she’s being celebrated and heralded … makes my heart feel very good," she said.

Hamer, who was unknowingly sterilized during a hospital stay in 1961, paid a heavy price for her civil rights activism. She lost her job on the plantation and when she was arrested with other activists in 1963, she was badly beaten in a Winona, Miss., jail.

In a nod to her work, a statue of Hamer was erected in Ruleville in 2012. A garden is also named after her there. The Fannie Lou Hamer Institute is housed at Jackson State University.

Thompson, who got the post office in Ruleville named after Hamer, said she would be particularly proud that Sunflower County now has a majority black board of supervisors as well as an African American sheriff and circuit clerk.

“It’s a testament to her dream," Thompson said. “A lot of what she wanted to happen — even though it didn’t happen in her lifetime — is now coming to be."

For the last four years, GirlTrek has been mobilizing women across the country to host Fannie walks that will take place Friday.

More than 175 walks are planned from Sacramento, to Jackson, Miss., to Birmingham, Ala., and up north to Boston. Some are small groups of families. Others will be hosted by churches and take place on college campuses.

“She played such a pivotal role, not just in the civil rights movement, not just as an icon for black women, but the story of her putting her body literally, physically on the line for the movement — there’s a lesson there for the work that we do with black women," said Garrison.

James Speights, vice president of the New Seminary in New York, is part of a team working to make a feature film — expected in 2019 — about Hamer.

“What we wanted to do is have Ms. Hamer explode into the consciousness not only of the general mainstream American population, but a new generation of activists,’’ said Speights.

With voting rights under attack, it’s a good time to insert Hamer into the debate, Speights said.

“After that '64 convention she became the face and voice of the voting rights movement. And that shouldn’t be forgotten,'' he said. "This just might serve as an impetus to stir people back into a heightened state of activity and activism.’’